The El Segundo Unified School District must pay $1 million to a former El Segundo Middle School student after failing to intervene when the teenager was bullied for almost a year.
El Segundo Unified appealed a Los Angeles County Superior Court’s 2022 order for the district to pay the sum to Eleri Irons, who was 13 years old in the fall of 2017 when the bullying started. The California Court of Appeal recently denied the district’s plea, according to a Monday press release from the former student’s attorney, upholding the L.A. County Court’s decision.
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The lawsuit, filed in 2019, stated Irons was verbally harassed and was sent hurtful text messages, and rumors were spread about her. The incidents happened on school property as well as during school-supervised field trips.
Irons suffered PTSD and harmed herself as a result of the bullying, Irons’ attorney Christa Ramey said previously.
The L.A. County Superior Court jury in 2022 found that ESUSD was negligent in addressing the situation, and that the district’s negligence was a substantial factor in causing Irons’ injuries, the recent ruling reads.
In June 2018, a group of students circulated a petition titled, “Let’s Kill Eleri Irons,” according to the lawsuit. Despite knowing about the petition, teachers failed to notify Irons’ parents, the complaint said.
Irons and her parents made numerous requests to the school’s counselors and administrators for help, but the school “dismissed the concerns as drama over a teen love triangle,” Ramey said previously.
The jury in the 2022 trial ordered El Segundo Unified to pay Irons $1 million in damages, including $700,000 for past noneconomic damages and $300,000 for future noneconomic damages, the ruling reads.
But the district appealed that decision, arguing that insufficient evidence supported the jury’s finding that Irons’ injuries were caused by El Segundo Middle School employees’ negligent failure to protect the former student from other students’ bullying.
The trial court erred in allowing Irons to rely on certain provisions of the California Education Code, the district argued in its appeal, per the ruling, as well as when it allowed the jury to consider a negligent training and supervision theory because Irons had dismissed her second cause of action for negligent hiring, retention, supervision and training.
The district also argued that it is immune from liability because decisions made by school employees in responding to the bullying complaints were discretionary under state law, Irons failed to prove her injuries were caused by negligence of middle school employees, the court should have excluded testimony from one of Irons’ expert witnesses and Irons’ counsel engaged in misconduct during closing arguments.
Those arguments, however, lacked merit, according to the appeal court’s ruling, as the district breached its duty to conform to a certain standard of care for the protection of others against unreasonable risks. The district in its appeal raised concerns that it didn’t during the initial trial, the ruling added, pushing back using the “misguided” argument that the Education Code does not assert mandatory duties onto school personnel to protect students from other students’ behavior.
After the 2022 ruling, meanwhile, El Segundo Unified added two student safety assistant positions at two elementary schools and adopted a tailored security assessment for all schools.
